The Pentagon: A History (39 page)

The workers were to lay all twelve cables across the river—the most that had ever been attempted in one operation. The diver would follow the barge and guide the cables into a trench that had been dredged across to the Washington side. Two brakemen—Watts among them—were assigned to each reel, with the task of making sure the cable did not pay out too fast as a tugboat towed each barge across the river. It was a forlorn hope. The heavy cable splashing into the water quickly built up a momentum of its own, pushing Watts’s barge forward with alarming speed and forcing the tugboat out of the way. “The sliding cable was pushing the barge and we, as brakemen, could do nothing to slow it down,” Watts recalled. “The barge wound up jammed up against the north bank, luckily where it was supposed to be.” Somehow, no one was injured and the job was done.

Just before midnight on September 12, the massive Pentagon switchboard was plugged into service. Like seemingly everything in the building, it was the world’s largest. The switchboard, especially designed for the Pentagon by Bell Telephone Laboratories, filled 32,000 feet on the first floor of the building, four times larger than the temporary board that had been in use. Hundreds of telephone installers working in teams spent seventeen weeks stringing 68,600 miles of trunk lines through the Pentagon and connecting 27,000 telephones.

In the somnolent years before the war, ten operators had been able to handle the War Department switchboard at the Munitions Building. The Pentagon switchboard required three hundred operators and twenty-two supervisors, most of them women. They sat in long rows stretching dozens of yards, shoulder to shoulder on high stools with backs, headsets over coiffed hair. Some handled calls to, from, and within the building, others placed long-distance calls, and a smaller number provided information. The operators were soon answering 90,000 calls a day—and later over 100,000 a day, each caller hearing the same greeting with a recitation of the Pentagon telephone number: “This is the War Department—RE 6700.” Every call, even those within the building, had to be connected manually; the operators would plug a jack in the proper line group and dial the last two digits of the individual extension.

“It really was the eighth wonder of the world,” recalled Marian J. Bailey. Twenty years old, with long chestnut-brown hair, Bailey was a government girl who had arrived in Washington in January 1942 from Chadron, Nebraska. She was hired by the War Department in March and put to work training operators for the Pentagon switchboard. Bailey, who had a bossy streak, was in heaven in the Pentagon. The operators “were very important, very prestigious,” she recalled. “You couldn’t do anything without us.”

Indeed, the switchboard was so vital that officials considered building an eighteen-inch-thick concrete wall fortified with sandbags to protect the telephone room. Ultimately they decided against it, using faultless Army logic: “[S]hould we experience an air raid causing great damage to the building and should there be very little of the building left, there will be little need for telephone communications,” a report noted.

The whip

The men leading the project, Renshaw, McShain, and Hauck, had not failed yet, and by late October there was no reason to expect they would. But that was not good enough for Groves. “Certainly, even the greatest racehorses have to have the whip applied in the home stretch,” he once wrote.

Groves had been consumed in recent weeks with the Manhattan Project, trying to establish an enormous production facility at Oak Ridge and attempting to assert control over the unruly scientists. He wanted to imprison Leo Szilard, the brilliant Hungarian physicist who had an important role in initiating the project. Groves considered him a dishonorable troublemaker who might delay the whole project. On October 28, Groves drafted a letter for the secretary of war proposing that Szilard be confined as an enemy alien for the rest of the war. (Stimson declined to sign the letter, reasoning that as far as he knew the Constitution was still in effect. “This was the answer I expected but I thought that there was no harm in trying,” Groves later said.)

After writing the letter, Groves devoted much of the next three days to ensuring that everything at the Pentagon was ready for Marshall and Stimson. He inspected the site each day, ready to apply the whip. What bothered Groves most was the mess. The inner courtyard in particular was a shambles, filled with construction debris and mounds of dirt. “There’s got to be more effort shown on cleaning up around there,” he told Renshaw. “There’s a tremendous amount of stuff still to move out, and I’m afraid you’re going to get caught.”

There were not enough trucks to haul out debris—every one that Renshaw could scrape up was hauling fill for the roads, which also had to be finished by November. The Army had taken to “recapturing” many of the trucks and excavators that had been rented for the job, using a federal seizure law that allowed the government to purchase the equipment, applying rent that had already been paid. The companies that owned the trucks and excavators pleaded they would be driven out of business if the government seized their equipment, but the Army was unsympathetic. The owner of a 1941 International dump truck recaptured by the Army took matters into his own hands, sneaking into the Pentagon job site on the night of September 21 and repossessing his truck while the driver was eating dinner. The owner hightailed it to the hills of central Maryland and hid the truck in the woods, using a welding torch to disguise it. Maryland State Police found the truck a month later, and it was brought back to the Pentagon the night of October 20. Despite all this, Renshaw was still short—he was trying to find twenty-five more trucks to haul out debris, thus far without success.

Fortunately for Renshaw, he had some leeway. On October 24, the largest war fleet ever to sail from America had weighed anchor from Hampton Roads with a secret destination: the shores of North Africa. Stimson and Marshall would wait until the troops were ashore before moving into the Pentagon. It would be too dangerous to be moving in the midst of a landing, particularly if things went badly. The invasion—three separate landings in French Morocco and Algeria—was set for Sunday, November 8, 1942; the high command would move into the Pentagon the following weekend.

The timing of the move was kept quiet for security reasons. Indeed, until recently the press had been confused as to whether Stimson would even relocate to the Pentagon. Over the summer the War Department had insisted that no decision had been made. As late as September 17, the
Washington Post
confidently reported that Stimson would not move into the Pentagon but would either stay in the Munitions Building or move into the other New War Department Building in Foggy Bottom.

But in Stimson’s own office, there was never any doubt that the secretary of war was going to the Pentagon. Stimson, it was true, was not eager to abandon Washington for the wilds of Virginia, and he was personally content to stay in the Munitions Building. But he had long since decided that the most efficient prosecution of the war lay in consolidating the high command with as much of the War Department as possible.

Reporters were appalled to learn in late September that the Bureau of Public Relations—their lifeline for war news—would be moving shortly to the Pentagon, meaning news organizations already left shorthanded by the war would have to regularly send correspondents on time-consuming trips across the river. The executive committee for the Radio Correspondents’ Galleries at the U.S. Congress—a young reporter for CBS named Eric Sevareid among them—unanimously objected to the move and wrote Stimson asking him to reconsider. Other press organizations, including the National Press Club, also appealed to the secretary to save them from the Pentagon.

In reply, Stimson sympathized that the move to “the Pentagon Building does not seem to make the day’s work any easier for my good friends of The National Press Club.

“Since my own antipathy to moving across the river is well known,” the secretary continued, “it must be assumed that the movement of the Bureau of Public Relations would not have been approved had I believed that it could save time or provide adequate service for the Press by remaining at or near its present location, isolated from its sources of information and of policy rulings.” Stimson’s reply made it clear that the War Department’s center of gravity—most important, he himself—was moving to the Pentagon, and if reporters wanted to cover it, they had better adjust.

Carry me back to Old Virginny

No organization was more aghast at the thought of moving into the Pentagon than the United States Navy. Yet Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, approached George Marshall in October with the suggestion that King move his office into the Pentagon alongside the Army chief of staff so that the two men could work in closer harmony.

That such a proposal would come from Ernie King was, at first glance, startling. The cantankerous and blunt admiral was a fierce Navy partisan with a legendary temper. “He is the most even-tempered man in the Navy,” his daughter once said. “He is always in a rage.” King and Marshall, so unlike in temperament, had little fondness for each other. Since the war began, King had constantly pushed for greater priority to be placed on defeating Japan, a stance that often put him at odds with the War Department and the official U.S. strategy to defeat Germany first. Yet King, for all his intemperance, believed it his duty to improve relations with Marshall and the Army. In recent weeks, moreover, the Navy had suffered a series of setbacks in the Solomon Islands in the South West Pacific Area. A spate of news stories suggested that the Navy was holding back the war effort by refusing to join a unified command under General Douglas MacArthur.

Stimson was often dismayed by the Navy’s selfish and anachronistic ways. Many problems between the Army and Navy were inevitable, Stimson wrote in his memoirs, but some “grew mainly from the peculiar psychology of the Navy Department, which frequently seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet and the United States Navy the only true Church.” The high priests of this church were a group Stimson referred to as “the Admirals”—the powerful chiefs of various Navy bureaus who were not accountable to King or Admiral Harold Stark, chief of naval operations, but instead reported to the secretary of the Navy and Congress. Faced with the same situation at the turn of the century, Secretary of War Elihu Root, Stimson’s mentor, had cleaned house of the bureaucratic service officers who then dominated the Army. That had not happened in the Navy. “‘The Admirals’ had never been given their comeuppance,” Stimson wrote.

The secretary of war was pleased to find a change in King’s tone in late October, noting in his diary that the admiral “is now in a very humble frame of mind on account of the pounding he is getting from the press in respect to Navy command matters.” Perhaps this new attitude helped account for King’s proposal to move into the Pentagon. It also probably did not hurt that conditions in the Navy Building—another so-called “temporary” World War I structure—were at least as bad as in the Munitions Building next door on Constitution Avenue; one admiral described King’s broken-down, filthy headquarters as “the most disreputable office I have ever seen.”

Marshall, even more than King, had long sought deeper cooperation between the services, but the admirals had rebuffed his past efforts. Mulling King’s request, the Army chief of staff decided to go much further. He proposed that the entire Navy high command, including Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, move into the Pentagon, along with as much of the Department of the Navy as would fit. In the name of unity, Marshall would keep a large part of the War Department out of the Pentagon and give 800,000 square feet of office space to the Navy. Knox and King would be placed in suites on the floor directly above those of Stimson and Marshall. The displaced War Department workers would either stay in the Munitions Building or move into the Navy Building. It was a bold and magnanimous proposal, one that might bring about a revolution in Army-Navy relations.

Marshall sounded out the idea with Stimson on the morning of Saturday, October 31. The secretary was delighted. “I told him at once that I thought it was a magnificent idea at this time when there is so much discontent over the alleged lack of unity of command between the Army and the Navy,” Stimson wrote.

Stimson invited Knox to his office the following Monday, November 2, to discuss the proposition. Open-faced and affable, the sixty-eight-year-old Knox had energetically rebuilt the Navy since Pearl Harbor but, no great naval mind, deferred to the admirals on most matters. As Stimson outlined the proposal, Knox responded warmly, calling it “very generous.” King was pleased too, envisioning the Navy and Army headquarters consolidating much of their work—the Army staff taking over some jobs entirely and the Navy staff other assignments.

After their meeting, Stimson and Knox made separate trips to inspect the Pentagon—it was the first time Stimson, who was wedded to Washington, had even laid eyes on the building—and both were well satisfied with the arrangements. Knox timed the trip by limousine from the Navy Building to the Pentagon and was pleased to find it took only five minutes. Captain Bob Furman trotted behind as Knox and his entourage toured the building. Reaching Stimson’s suite, the secretary of the Navy covetously looked the plush surroundings up and down. “I want the same damn thing on my floor,” Knox announced. After his visit, Knox spoke with Stimson and formally accepted the Army invitation. Stimson telephoned Roosevelt at Hyde Park at the end of the day November 2 to report on the proposition and get the president’s approval. “He was very much pleased with it and told us to go ahead,” Stimson reported.